Saint Maximus the Confessor

Saint Maximus the Confessor, (born c. 580, Constantinople—died Aug. 13, 662, Lazica), the most important Byzantine theologian of the 7th century, whose commentaries on the early 6th-century Christian Neoplatonist Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and on the Greek Church Fathers considerably influenced the theology and mysticism of the Middle Ages.

A court secretary of the Eastern Roman emperor Heraclius I, Maximus became a monkc. 613 at a monastery near Chrysopolis in Bithynia. Fleeing to North Africa because of the Persian invasion of 626, he took part at Carthage (near modern Tunis) in the Monothelite controversy over the doctrine that Christ, while having two distinct natures, divine and human, in his one Person (a doctrine firmly established) nonetheless had only one will and one operation. Arguing for a dual-will faculty in Christ, Maximus was called to Rome, where he supported the condemnation of Monothelitism by a regional church council under Pope Martin I in 649. Maximus and Martin were arrested by the emperor Constans II in an intricate theological–political tactic, and, after imprisonment from 653 to 655, Maximus was later tortured and exiled; he died in the wilderness near the Black Sea.

Throughout his approximately 90 major works Maximus developed a Christocentric theology and mysticism. His Opuscula theologica et polemica (“Short Theological and Polemical Treatises”), Ambigua (“Ambiguities” in the works of Gregory of Nazianzus), and Scholia (on Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite), mostly authentic, express Maximus’ teaching on the transcendental, nonpredicable nature of the divinity, his intrinsic Trinitarian existence, and his definitive communication in Christ. In his 400 Capita de caritate (“Four Hundred Chapters on Charity”), Maximus counselled a Christian humanism, integrating asceticism with ordinary life and active charity.

Maximus’ attempt to achieve balance in spiritual theory and practice was not always furthered by later theologians; he thus remains an independent and original thinker in the history of Christian speculation.